The 'musical magic' of MIDI

This month marks 30 years since the creation of another piece of ground breaking technology that brought about a revolution in recorded music.

It was called MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and the Today programme's Tom Bateman discovered how modern popular music would be unrecognisable without it.

"Its gone from hundreds of thousands of key boards, to millions of PCs, and now is on billions of cell phones, its kind of fun thinking of it like that," MIDI's creator Dave Smith explained, attributing the open-source nature of the software to its success.

"Of course it would have been even more fun to make some money off of it," he added.

BBC links

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